Brian Vallelunga loves to build things - products, companies, or silly things on the side. In Elementary school, he was asked by one of his friends, "why can't you put a movie on your phone?". This got Brian's mind racing, and he went home, ripped a movie into the specific format for his flip phone, and shared it immediately with his friend. Post that, he competed in science fairs, even at the state level. One of the projects, he built a craft that was lighter than a fingernail, and flew without wings or engines.
Brian led a portion of the engineering team at Uber, after inserting himself as an intern into the right meetings, which awarded him interesting projects. At the same time, he was building a crypto marketplace on the side, but struggling to get it launched. After taking a trip to reset, his mind kept coming back to a problem he faced while attempting to launch the marketplace - and it was surrounding managing environment variables and secrets. And his community of developers confirmed the need.
After the lessons of rail, the Denver region might just be ready to move into a bus-centric transit future that better addresses climate change, air quality, and inequity. But there's one unfulfilled promise standing in the way: the Boulder train. Is it time for locals to let that go, or is there hope on the horizon? Part 4 of 4.
Hosted and reported by Nathaniel Minor
Editors: Erin Jones, Joe Wertz
Production and mixing: Rebekah Romberg
Additional production: Luis Antonio Perez
Theme song by Daniel Mescher. Additional music via Universal Production Music.
Artwork: Mia Rincón
Executive producers: Kevin Dale, Brad Turner
Additional editorial support: Jo Erickson, Alison Borden, Rachel Estabrook, Ana Campbell, Sherkiya Wedgeworth-Hollowell, Andrew Villegas, Dave Burdick
Archival tape thanks: Heather Dalton and Dominic Dezzutti at CPT-12; Tim Wieland and Steve Vriesman at CBS4 Denver; Kevin Krug at KMGH Denver7.
Thanks also to Kim Nguyen, Jodi Gersh, Clara Shelton, Hart Van Denburg.
Ghost Train is a production of CPR News and Colorado Public Radio's Audio Innovations Studio.
It was a panic attack — Russia’s economy suffered the fastest plummet we’ve seen, because Putin’s piggy bank had a crack. TikTok’s is expanding to 10 minute videos because it’s chosen the hardest path. And a record $4B was just dropped on water real estate for an offshore wind farm capturing the Snooki Gusts.
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Every year, before the start of Lent, in hundreds of cities around the world, there is a massive celebration. While the celebrations differ, sometimes dramatically, there are certain elements they all share.
Modern celebrations can often get quite racy, and if you didn’t know it, you’d probably never guess that the origins of the celebration actually have a religious origin.
Learn more about Carnival and Mardi Gras, and how the modern celebrations came to be, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Starting with Soviet involvement in the war in Asia and ending with a bloody counter-insurgency in the borderlands of Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics, the Soviet Union's war was both considerably longer and more all-encompassing than is sometimes appreciated. Here, acclaimed scholar Mark Edele explores the complex experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary citizens – Russians and Koreans, Ukrainians and Jews, Lithuanians and Georgians, men and women, loyal Stalinists and critics of his regime – to reveal how the Soviet Union and leadership of a ruthless dictator propelled Allied victory over Germany and Japan.
In doing so, Edele weaves together material on the society and culture of the wartime years with high-level politics and unites the military, economic and political history of the Soviet Union with broader popular histories from below. The result is an engaging, intelligent and authoritative account of the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1949.
Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies and Eastern Europe.
Dennis Kelley is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He received his Master’s and Doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with emphases in American Indian Religious Traditions, Religion in American Culture, and Myth and Ritual Theory. His most recent book is Tradition, Performance, and Religion in Native America: Ancestral Ways, Modern Selves, and is currently working on a book tentatively titled Having Had a Spiritual (Re)Awakening: Religion and Alcohol Addiction Recovery in Indian Country.
From historian and critically acclaimed author of The Three-Cornered War comes the propulsive and vividly told story of how Yellowstone became the world’s first national park amid the nationwide turmoil and racial violence of the Reconstruction era.
Each year nearly four million people visit Yellowstone National Park—one of the most popular of all national parks—but few know the fascinating and complex historical context in which it was established. In late July 1871, the geologist-explorer Ferdinand Hayden led a team of scientists through a narrow canyon into Yellowstone Basin, entering one of the last unmapped places in the country. The survey’s discoveries led to the passage of the Yellowstone Act in 1872, which created the first national park in the world.
Now, author Megan Kate Nelson examines the larger context of this American moment, illuminating Hayden’s survey as a national project meant to give Americans a sense of achievement and unity in the wake of a destructive civil war. Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America(Scribner, 2022) follows Hayden and two other protagonists in pursuit of their own agendas: Sitting Bull, a Lakota leader who asserted his peoples’ claim to their homelands, and financier Jay Cooke, who wanted to secure his national reputation by building the Northern Pacific Railroad through the Great Northwest. Hayden, Cooke, and Sitting Bull staked their claims to Yellowstone at a critical moment in Reconstruction, when the Grant Administration and the 42nd Congress were testing the reach and the purpose of federal power across the nation.
A narrative of adventure and exploration, Saving Yellowstone is also a story of Indigenous resistance, the expansive reach of railroad, photographic, and publishing technologies, and the struggles of Black southerners to bring racial terrorists to justice. It reveals how the early 1870s were a turning point in the nation’s history, as white Americans ultimately abandoned the higher ideal of equality for all people, creating a much more fragile and divided United States.
Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian living in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She has written about the Civil War, US western history, and American culture for TheNew York Times, TheWashington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation Magazine, and Civil War Monitor. Nelson earned her BA in history and literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American studies from the University of Iowa, and she has taught at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. Nelson is the author of Saving Yellowstone, The Three-Cornered War, Ruin Nation, and Trembling Earth. Twitter. Website.
Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website
We'll update you about the war in Ukraine: from what Russian troops are doing now to any progress from peace talks to the impact of sanctions.
Also, how businesses and sports organizations are pushing back against Russia.
Plus, what to expect from President Biden's State of the Union address, where negotiations stand for Major League Baseball after the deadline for players and owners to make a deal, and what Mardi Gras celebrations may look like this year.
On Monday, Russian forces made progress in their efforts to encircle Ukraine’s capital Kyiv despite being slowed down by continued resistance from Ukrainian forces. Russia and Ukraine also sent delegations to southeastern Belarus for initial talks amid hopes that the two countries could come to some kind of agreement, but did not come to a resolution.
Today, Texas holds the very first primary of the midterms. The elections will tell us a little bit about how strong of a hold former President Trump has on the GOP, and show us if the state is ready to elect more progressive candidates. Jessica Cisneros, a progressive-backed candidate who’s running for Texas’s 28th Congressional District, joins us to discuss how she’s feeling about her race.
And in headlines: A new study shows that Pfizer-BioNTech shots offer barely any protection from infection in kids 5 to 11 years old, a new climate change report found that countries are not doing enough to combat global warming, and jury selection began in the first criminal trial related to the January 6th insurrection.
Show Notes:
Vote Save America: Texas – https://votesaveamerica.com/state/texas/
Joe Biden prepares a State of the Union as war rages in Ukraine, Melissa Murray joins to talk about Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, and a look at the good, bad, and ugliest moments from this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
